


The End of Heroes

by centreoftheselights



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Greece, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Courage, F/F, Femslash February, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Heroism, Magic, POV Carmilla, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-10 00:16:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3269618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/centreoftheselights/pseuds/centreoftheselights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once, Carmilla lived in an Age of Heroes - but after she escapes her mother's punishment, she finds that heroes are long gone. That is, until she meets warrior-in-training Laura, and gets an entirely new view of the world.</p><p>A collection of short scenes posted on Tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Flesh Turned Stone

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be a series of short scenes from an AU version of canon set in Ancient Greece in around the fifth century BC. I've studied both Greek mythology and history before, although I'm no expert and I'm not necessarily aiming for perfect accuracy.
> 
> If you have any guesses about how the mythology fits in, please leave a comment! Some parts have been decided, but others are still open to suggestions.
> 
> This was written as part of both the [Femslash Big Bang 2015](http://femslashbigbang.tumblr.com/) and for [Femslash February](http://tumblr.com/tagged/Femslash-February).

There’s a story – an old, old story – of a woman by the name of Galatea. A king had dreamt her up, and fallen in love with his dream, with a perfection which existed only inside his mind. Utterly devoted, he carved an image of her out of marble, brought her flowers and fruits in offering, swore to love her and only her for as long as he might live. And so the goddess of love took pity on him, and brought Galatea to life, her heart driven to beat by a love which expected nothing in return.

Carmilla bore little in common with Galatea, and not least because she was far from perfect. Though they had both been drawn into a new life by the will of another, the two transformations were exact reversals of one another. Carmilla had traded human life for one as cold as stone, where she was little more than an ornament beside her mother’s throne. She attracted devotion, but no offering was hers to keep. And though she thought once that she had been reborn out of love, she realised all too soon that her mother cared little more for her than for the earth under her feet.

But that was a different story, older still – the minotaur’s tribute, Iphigenia bleeding on the sand. When the gods demanded sacrifice, it was unwise to defy them.

Carmilla had never been wise, and the price she paid for that was in centuries, bound in a prison of cypress. When her curse was finally broken, the world had changed much from how she remembered it. Monsters still roamed, and magic still shone in the air, but they were no longer fought. The great battles of old had long since ended, and instead the people turned to tribute and appeasement to save themselves from the wild dangers of the land.

The Age of Heroes was over, and evil could not be destroyed.


	2. One: Hearth and Home

In the modern age, the busy port of Sylas was viewed as one of the great Hellenic city-states, a bustling centre for trade and learning renowned by all the peoples of the central sea. It was in Sylas that silver-tongued poets brought audiences to tears in the marketplace, that ivory traders from Aethiopia debated democracy with Spartan diplomats, and that the students of the Great Library practised transmutation and pushed back the boundaries of natural philosophy. But it was for the military that the city had become most famed; its twin sacred armies, the most elite and disciplined warriors in the known world, who kept constant guard at the city walls against the incursion of mystical beasts which pressed forth from the wild woods beyond.

Carmilla despised the city with every shred of her being, and given her freedom she would never travel within 100 miles of the place. But she was bound here, by magic and blood and fear, and she would not risk the consequences of defiance again. So she returned, once every twenty years, to bite her tongue and do as her mother bid her.

To join a boarding house, and befriend whatever unfortunate young maidens lived there, isolated from their families and craving companionship. It had never been an arduous task, at least in terms of results. The hardest part of pushing the same boulder up the same hill again and again had always been the constant weight of _eternity_.

The city hadn’t changed much since her last visit. When you could remember a place as fields and farmlands, the shift of streets doesn’t seem worth noticing. It was still overfilled, with people and sounds and smells at every turn, crowding in on her and muffling her senses, an itch of discomfort she would not escape until she was gone from this stifling town once more.

The boarding house was a new one, but much the same as boarding houses have ever been. A tall, broad building, with a modest garden, from the outside it might be taken for a family house – but inside, it would be chopped into dozens of cramped rooms, as small as could be sold. The landlady lived elsewhere, so there would be a house mother, someone fussy and prudish, there to keep an eye on the young women who had travelled here to study with the masters of the great city.

Carmilla only made it two steps inside the door before she was greeted with a keen smile.

“Hello? Are you looking for a room?”

At first glance, the woman looked younger than Carmilla had expected. A second glance told her why. Though she had clearly tried, the girl before her couldn’t hide the green tint in her skin, and her carefully brushed hair already had delicate white blossoms blooming fresh among copper curls. As she stepped forward, a scent like damp earth and leaves uncurling in the spring flooded the room.

The house mother was a dryad.

When she caught Carmilla’s stare, the smile on her face became a little more forced, and her skin blanched even paler.

“I’m afraid we don’t have any vacancies, but I can direct you to –”

Carmilla cut her off. “I have a letter from the landlady.”

Her abruptness was mostly to see the fear pass over the nymph’s eyes. She hid it better than most did, the smile only faltering for a second, and Carmilla couldn’t smell it like she would on a human – but she took pleasure in such small cruelties.

The girl took her time scanning the letter, her lips pursed in displeasure, but she clearly couldn’t find the loophole she was looking for.

“Well, I suppose that seems to be in order,” she said, “although it is awfully soon after... Well, welcome to the house. I’m Perry, the house mother –”

“Fresh meat?” Unlike Perry, the newcomer made no attempt to mask their species, and the aqua sheen of their skin shone beneath a sharp fringe of ginger hair. They were an undine, probably the spirit of the house’s well, just as Perry was tied to the broad tree that grew in the courtyard.

“Hey, LaFonatine,” they introduced themselves. “Official –”

“Unofficial –” Perry corrected.

“ _Officially_ _unofficial_ house philosopher.” They turned to Perry. “I thought we were all booked up this month?”

“Well, apparently now that Betty is – temporarily elsewhere – the landlady has offered Carmilla her room.”

Perry’s mouth twisted on the name, but there was no fear in this one – just wide-eyed interest. LaFontaine was either very ignorant, or very foolhardy, or possibly both.

“You _know_ her?” They asked. “What’s she like? Is it true she -?”

“Well, I’m sure you must be tired from your journey,” Perry interrupted. “Why don’t I show you upstairs?”

“I’ll find my own way,” Carmilla told her, lifting her bag over her shoulder and heading for the stairs.

“Oh, um – second floor, last door on the right,” Perry called after her. “If you need me –”

“I’ll look in the garden,” Carmilla told her with a smirk, vanishing into the upper rooms of the house.


	3. Two: Crossing the Threshold

Carmilla paused outside the door Perry had directed her to. She wasn’t quite sure why, but she had never quite shaken the habit of it. There was still a part of her strung tight as an drawn bow, an arrow poised to fly. But there was nowhere safe to run to, and she had no desire to draw attention to herself.

Perhaps it was just wistfulness. She hoped that this one was easy to fool.

She kicked open the rickety wooden door and walked inside, dumping her bag on the unoccupied bed.

“Hey.”

The girl her mother had chosen for her spun around at once, a frown furrowing her forehead.

“Excuse me, but, who in Zeus’s name are you?”

There was a sharp edge of righteousness to the question, the kind that came only from a doting family and an overinflated sense of self-importance. Carmilla let a lazy smile curl across her face.

“I’m your new roommate, sweetheart.”

“What?” The disgust on the girl’s face was delightful. “You must have the wrong room. Ask Perry to show you –”

“Second floor, last on the right?” That shut her up. “Yeah, I think this is my room.”

“But I already have a roommate!” The girl might have been aiming for commanding, but she sounded about three seconds away from a tantrum. Stuck up, used to getting her own way, annoying – Carmilla could work with that.

“Well, don’t you catch on fast?” she teased.

“No, I mean – her name is _Betty_.”

“Well then, where’s Betty?”

The girl gritted her teeth. “She’s – missing – right now. _Apparently_ , she ran off into the woods to join a _mystery_ _cult_ –”

Carmilla smirked. Will must have cleared the way for her. That was his style – ostentatious, eye-catching, sloppy.

“So, Betty’s not actually here, but you still want me to leave?”

Betty, whoever she was, had terrible taste. Her half of the room was littered with skimpy outfits and cheap jewellery. Not that her roommate was any better – leather armour fastidiously folded under a bronze training sword, the sign of a mind desperate to impose order upon a chaotic universe.

From her new bed, Carmilla lifted a copper necklace engraved with large flowers – little more than an excuse to draw the eyes to the breasts – and held it up to her neck as though she might ever consider wearing the hideous thing.

“Give me that!” Her new roommate leapt to her feet, snatching the necklace out of Carmilla’s hands. “That’s not yours!”

“It’s in my room.”

“It’s not your room!”

Carmilla leant forward, her most irritating smile on her face. “I have a letter from your landlady that says otherwise.”

The girl in front of her visibly deflated, but she didn’t back away. Carmilla decided to throw her a bone, give her something to sink her teeth into that would keep her out of the way.

“Tell you what,” she said, letting promise drip from every word. “If Betty shows up, I’ll find someplace else. But until then...”

She sat down, stretching herself out on the bed as the girl began babbling about how she was going to get Betty back.

This girl was too easy. At this rate, Carmilla would be out of here within the week.


	4. Three: Playthings of the Gods

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you may have spotted, updates to this may be sporadic, especially over the next couple of months. However, the complete fic will be finished by December for the Femslash Big Bang.

It only took Carmilla a few days to settle in. Laura, as her roommate turned out to be called, was exactly as Carmilla had pegged her – a try-hard wannabe-warrior who wanted to put the world to rights, but was shocked to the core by every little thing Carmilla did to annoy her. She wouldn’t last five minutes in a real battle, so perhaps it was a mercy that she’d never have the chance to make it so far.

But a roommate could be taken any time, and there were others on the list to consider. So she went out every night, to parties and festivals and whatever else the young people did in this age. That aroused some notice at first, from the neurotic dryad and the over-curious undine – but once she claimed to be apprenticed to a poet, they seemed to decide it was only to be expected that she sleep each day until after the sun had set. And since Laura spent every moment she could at the training grounds, that gave Carmilla all the freedom she needed to complete her task.

She scoped out all the ones she’d been told to find, even though they were not all for her. The first, it was clear, preferred a gentleman’s touch – Will would have to do. With a second she dawdled to long in the background, and Will snatched the opportunity from her as though it was something she might not give willingly.

But the third – the third was all hers.

Elsie was an initiate at the temple of Artemis, training for the priestesshood, and had sworn off the touch of men. Carmilla had dealt with ones like that before, cut off from physicality, yearning to remember the uses for their flesh. It didn’t take much wine to convince her to follow Carmilla home.

She was fair, of course. Mortal lives may be playthings to the gods, but their downfalls are always their own doing. There had to be a chance to escape their fate. And so Carmilla smiled too wide, bared her teeth and bit the girl’s neck – but Elsie just laughed, drunk on the gentle touch of flesh and she blind to the danger. Greed must have been the girl’s fatal flaw, for even after Laura interrupted and sent her scurrying for her own bed, she returned the next night of her own free will, clamouring for more.

The threads of fate were woven. Elsie didsn’t even struggle until Carmilla’s hand tightened around her throat, and by then it was far, far too late.

When she took her in, one of her mother’s goons asked if this one was to be thrown back like the others were. Carmilla hid a shudder at the thought of playing the role again, seducing this girl when the blankness filled her eyes and her memories of the first time had faded like morning mist.

“Not worth it,” she said. “She’s a temple girl. If she shows up without her memory, they’ll get suspicious, tighten ranks around her. May as well keep her here.”

They accepted the answer without question, and Carmilla bit her lip and returned to Laura’s room.

She had been fair to Laura too, of course, and her roommate was not so careless with herself as Elsie had been. Laura’s dislike of her was evident. This was her chance to run – to insist on a new room, far away from here. Of course, Carmilla’s mother would be disappointed that the girl she had first chosen had left so unexpectedly, but these things happened. There were always alternatives.

When Carmilla entered the room and found the two nymphs there, she wondered if Laura hadn’t finally had enough. But there were no signs of her packing or preparing to leave – just two nosy spirits in her room.

Carmilla began stripping off her clothes, watching the dryad blush as she pretended she didn’t want to be watching. Now there was a case of unbalanced humours if she’d ever seen one – and she considered saying as much, if only she hadn’t thought the philosophising water spirit might take her seriously.

The two made their excuses and left, and Carmilla headed to the windowsill where the food was kept. She could really use a drink.

“Yeah, you’re not going to find your “wine” over there.” Laura’s voice was laced with smug satisfaction.

Carmilla turned slowly, and saw the girl holding the jar, seal cracked. So much for good old-fashioned privacy.

“It was just a prank,” she said with a shrug, trying not to let her mind spiral onto the next source of blood she might happen across. She didn’t like to kill for her food, but if her supply had been cut off...

“Some prank,” Laura said with a scowl, as petty-minded as ever. “You are such a freak.”

A rueful smile crept across her face before she could stop herself. Carmilla _was_ a freak – but she was so much more than that.

“There are worse things to be.”


	5. Four: Ancient Heart

Carmilla was in a foul mood, with a gnawing in her stomach that she told herself was hunger, not guilt from the latest body tallied to her count. Laura wasn’t helping. The girl was chattering on about some petty grievance, as though her feud with Carmilla was anything more than a moment’s distraction from her own impending death. She spoke as though Carmilla’s soul was hers to dissect and analyse, not realising that the tiny room of her mind could not contain the planet’s worth of travels Carmilla had seen.

“Pull one more trick like that, and I’ll get the landlady to throw you out,” she declared, her face twisting with that righteous, pointless anger.

“I’d pay to see that,” Carmilla snapped back. Laura was small, even to her – to her mother, she would be an ant, hardly worth crushing underfoot. Carmilla’s mother might as well be a god, for all the hope any of them had of influencing her, and if Laura tried to interfere she would find her fate was as merciless as any of those who had reached with grasping hands towards the heavens themselves.

“Uh, are we interrupting? The house mother said Laura wanted to speak to us.”

Two girls stand in the doorway – Will’s most recent catches. Neither of them remembered her, though she knew them. One she spoke to only briefly, not long enough to stick in the mind of someone who wasn’t wired to notice her particular charms. The other, it had been the evening she was taken. The space Carmilla had once occupied in her mind would already be blank.

Carmilla hated this part of the ritual, something new since her return. It had been Will’s idea, to throw the girls back, give them a history of sudden disappearances and erratic behaviour before the second stage. Pretty words to justify a second hunt. Her brother had sharper teeth than he liked to let on.

To look at them now, you would think these were the same girls Carmilla had flirted with only nights ago – they hadn’t yet realised they had already been murdered. Soon, the emptiness inside of them would start to show, their souls flaking away like the colours on an old statue. Only when there was nothing left would they be guided back, finally blank enough to be suitable for whatever foul purpose her mother had for them.

Carmilla buried her nose in an old tale, one she had probably lived through the origins of and had certainly read a hundred times since. She only dimly noted the changes, the way the tale had shifted to fit a world of sailors and soldiers, not farmers and huntsmen. The heart of it beat only faintly in the modern age, buried in centuries of misinterpretation.

It wasn’t distracting enough. When one of the girls started describing her odd dreams, the hallmark of those haunted by her kind’s attentions, Carmilla couldn’t help but butt in.

“And then Hades rode up in his chariot and snatched you away?” she asked.

The girl glanced her way for a moment, and Carmilla wondered from the wide terror in her eyes if some part of her remembered, knew that Carmilla had helped lead her to her doom.

Then she sputtered and ran, and her friend followed after her, leaving Carmilla once again alone with the eager investigator.

“If someone’s kidnapping girls, I can see why they threw those two back,” Carmilla said with a sneer. From hearing them speak, she’s certain they would have noticed her warnings just as little as Elsie had. Not that Will would have given them any chances – if someone ran from him, it was because he enjoyed the thrill of the chase.

Laura all but spasmed in her seat, her small frame shaking with the strength of her indignation. “That was an actual person who had something terrifying happen to her, and all you can do is make awful jokes!”

Carmilla rolled her eyes at the pointlessness of it all. She’s tired of this investigation playtime. She wants this to be over. “You don’t actually think you’re doing anything to help that girl, do you?”

“At least I’m trying to do something! That’s better than lounging around pretending to be all cool and disaffected when really you’re just miserable and alone.”

That was too much. Carmilla was hungry and trapped in a city she despised, and the last thing she needed was condescension from some fool too blind to sense the knife at her throat. She was ending this tonight, suspicion be damned. She could have this girl chained up in some cellar by midnight and be on the other side of the world before she next saw a sunrise.

“You’re a child, and you understand nothing,” she informed Laura. “Not about life, not about this place, and certainly not what it takes to _survive_. The sooner off your little investigation ends, the better off you’ll be.”

Carmilla bit back a snarl, and turned away. Hours, that was all she had to wait. Just until it was dark enough to drag Laura to her mother’s lair – one last sacrifice for the altar, and then she could forget about this for another twenty years.

“No.”

The voice was so small Carmilla couldn’t believe she’d heard it.

“No,” Laura repeated. “I’m not just going to give up. Maybe you’re right, maybe I am a child. A nineteen year old who had never left her island before she got here. Who thought an apprenticeship was going to be some big adventure, full of battles to fight and festivals to dance at! Who never thought anything bad could actually happen. Well, turns out the world doesn’t work exactly how I thought it was going to. This city is creepy, and parties are full of numbskulls getting hammered, and girls _go_ _missing_ , and _nobody_ seems to care.

“So maybe that’s just the way it is, but that does _not_ mean I have to accept it. I deserve better. Betty deserves better. Zeus, even _you_ deserve better.”

Carmilla blinked at her roommate, trying to process what she had just heard. She hadn’t thought Laura had such fire in her. Hadn’t thought _anyone_ did any more. Among the weak, fragile hearts of this age, she had never thought to hear such a rush of fire, passion, blood.

Oh, Laura was a fool, but not the fool she had thought five minutes earlier. It wasn’t that she didn’t see the danger – it was that she wouldn’t run from it. Carmilla could tell her now, precisely what was to happen to her, and still she would stay. She would fight, for the sake of some greater good. To protect people. The innocent, she might say, if such a thing still existed.

Carmilla had heard speeches like that before, on battlefields and the prows of ships, in gardens and bedchambers. She had seen such women blaze with light, and she had seen them burnt out, broken and bloody from what it cost them.

As far as she knew, she was the only soul left to remember their names.

Laura almost made her believe in those times again, back before humanity had learned to cower and kneel and bare their throats in the vain hope of survival. With a heart like that, perhaps she could forge the world anew again, lead them to fight the monsters once more, make them believe they had a hope of winning.

Such a woman could do incredible things.

All Carmilla’s clever words died in her throat, and she watched Laura walk out the door without a word.

If only she hadn’t died so young.


End file.
